Dr. Sheila Collins is petite, passionate and packed with energy.
When she’s not traveling or researching in her laboratory, she does weightlifting and goes to ballet class. She’s been a fitness instructor throughout most of her career, teaching classes to the tune of Michael Jackson, Donna Summers, Rick James and M.C. Hammer.
“Use it or lose it. Just do something. Anything. Go climb a rock wall if that works for you,” she said on a recent afternoon, sitting at her office at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in Lake Nona.
Collins, professor of Integrative Metabolism Program at Sanford Burnham, has been studying hormones and cells in humans to find out how to tackle obesity and prevent type 2 diabetes.
She came to the institute in 2010 from Duke University, attracted in part by its unique collaboration with the Translational Research Institute in Orlando.
“I wanted to be in a situation where I could say, OK, that works in a cell, but what about a person,” she said.
Nearly 10 years after receiving more than $300 million in Florida’s Innovation Incentive Funds along with the support of the city, county and local business leaders, the institute in Lake Nona says it is steadily making strides in research in areas of cancer, diabetes and obesity, and continues to recruit scientists such as Collins to Central Florida.
This year, the institute brought in Dr. E. Douglas Lewandowski, a pioneer in unraveling the connection between nutrients and heart failure. It also received a $100 million gift from San Diego philanthropist Conrad Prebys and changed its name from Sanford Burnham to Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute.
And it struck yet another two-year partnership with Japanese pharmaceutical giant Takeda to explore new ways of slowing down and possibly reversing heart failure.
Most of the research is still years away from yielding a new drug. But that’s not a deterrent for the majority of the scientists. Curiosity and a desire to understand how humans function is the driving force for most.
Collins is researching how certain heart hormones can help the body burn more calories. Her target is the brown fat cell, which burns energy and keep us warm. White fat cells store excess energy, or the calories from that extra slice of pie you weren’t supposed to have.
Unlike our ancestors, “we don’t have to go out with a spear and run around to get a piece of meat,” she said. “We have what evolved from the cave days, and now the problem is trying to trick that system, because the body’s designed to grab that energy and store it.”
So Collins and her team are trying to figure out if there’s a way to “brown” white fat cells and trigger weight loss and prevent diabetes. The answer may lie in two heart hormones released in response to high blood pressure, especially since previous studies have shown that obese patients had lower levels of some of these heart hormones compared with their lean individuals.
“Together with the adrenaline system, [these] heart hormones can promote fat to release its stored energy and to drive this brown-fat energy-burning process,” she said.
Collins is collaborating with Dr. Richard Pratley at the Translational Research Institute, a joint project of Florida Hospital and the institute, to study the mechanism in humans.
Pratley arrived in Orlando four years ago from the University of Vermont, where he was director of the Diabetes and Metabolism Translational Medicine Unit.
The main driver for his move: access to patients at TRI, collaboration in the areas of diabetes and metabolism here, and the presence of quality researchers.
“I knew Sheila and the fact that she was here affected my decision,” said Pratley.
While Collins studies the interaction of hormones and cells in the laboratory, Pratley and his team study volunteers to measure energy expenditure. They’re trying to see if an already-available, heart failure drug called nesiritide, can also induce weight loss in the long term by triggering the mechanism that Collins is studying.
They measure the volunteers’ vitals and body composition. They plan to take that drug molecule back to the lab and tinker with it a bit more to see if they can make it more effective for their purposes or make it last longer in the body.
“It’s great fun. It gets me out of bed,” Collins said. “When I started my research years ago, I remember saying, ‘I’m going to do it until it’s not fun anymore.’ When fun’s over, I’m out. I’m still in, so it’s still fun.”
nmiller@tribune.com or 407-420-5158
